DDboost

Several of our Data Domains are end-of-life and need to be replaced with new hardware. In most of the cases it’s a small site with a small Data Domain that only holds roughly 1 month of backups. In these cases we just install a new Data Domain next to it, reconfigure our our backup software, and that’s it. After a month, the old backups have expired and you can switch off the old Data Domain.

For the slightly larger sites, there’s more than one backup client/server writing to the Data Domain. There are Oracle RMAN backups, SQL dumps, etc. Plus the retention of backups on the Data Domain is much, much longer. In these cases you want to perform a proper Data Domain migration which retains the name and IP address of the old Data Domain, so you don’t have to touch all the clients. Here’s how you do that, and a DDBoost gotcha you should be aware of!

I recently deployed a new 32TB Data Domain DD3300 system. The initial configuration is easy and familiar enough. Connect to the system via the serial cable, setup iDRAC, and run the initial configuration wizard. Afterwards the rest of the configuration can be performed via SSH and/or the GUI.

While continuing with the configuration, I noticed I could not create an aggregate Ethernet interface. No LACP or Etherchannel! So what if my Ethernet interface goes down, for whatever reason?

Last week I’ve been implementing two new Data Domain systems for a new customer who’d like to use these systems as backup targets for their existing Veeam 8 environment. Backup would be replicated to the secondary system to guarantee recoverability even if the first system or data center experiences a catastrophic failure. In this case replication will be handled by the Data Domain system itself. You’d like your backup software to be aware of the replicas on the secondary location. This in turn means Veeam should be able to read from the replica, which turned out to be a bit of a configuration challenge. Bring out the CLI!